Cause and Effect

14052012

Some survey results have come to my attention recently, and what they said, whilst not surprising, still made for shocking reading.

One survey found that nearly two-thirds of the random samples of the video games that they tested had themes of violence with the intention of causing injury or harm, so this did not include the likes of sporting games. I know that two thirds can sound deceiving, but to put that into perspective, there were a total of 90 games tested across a range of different gaming consoles. That is a lot. Yes, there are many games out there that may have slipped by unnoticed, but violence was classified from the minimal to full on blood and gore. So all bases were covered.

It was also revealed that of 396 ‘T-rated’ games (‘T’ standing for teen) at the start on the millennium, 94% had violent content to some degree, and this was made clear in the content descriptor.

I don’t know about you, and I know that the survey was done slightly over ten years ago, but this is still shocking. Think about it for a moment, how many new games have come out in that time? How many of them are based on the success of previous ‘best-sellers’? It makes for a scary thought. Especially given that the results of the survey showed that there was an average killing in the games every thirty seconds.

Combine this with the research that I discussed the other week about Bundura’s ‘Bobo Doll’ experiment, and it really is a chilling statistic, particularly when quite a number of games these days have spawned from, or even spawn movie franchises. I think that even though the government has done a good thing to bring in an ‘R 18+’ rating recently, the way that the system was before that banned some games from making the shelves completely was better. I say this because, with the number of games ever expanding, children are less likely to grow bored of the games, where less variety, might make them more inclined to go outside and play.